His childhood training in logical thinking crystallized his keen mind and made him peculiar fitted for the task he assumed. In other words, he was early trained in inductive reasoning, and he was able to scientifically construct hitherto unknown principles in the care of the sick.
(1) *Exact observation : Hahnemann’s honest disappointment with the practice of medicine as manifested in the eighteenth century was the direct result of his faculties of observation and reasoning. His early training demanded of him that he find logical reasons for the administration of medicinal substances, and that once given, favourable results were to be expected.
The chaotic prescriptions of that day left little reasonable grounds for clear-cut results, and his observations of the frequent failure of the physician to help sick patients toward cure, or worse still, the rapid decline of the patient in seemingly simple and uncomplicated cases under the best medical care procurable, led Hahnemann to renounce the practice of medicine. He turned to chemistry and the translation of medical literature as a means of livelihood. In one of these translations as item on the use of cinchona bark for intermittent fever arrested his attention, since he himself had recently suffered such a malady. His interest was aroused, and his experiments with medicinal substances (which he later called *provings) were begun.
Here he first caught the gleam of light that led him to an understanding of the reasonable application of remedies, based on the *exact observation of the ability of the drug to produce symptoms, on the one hand, and of the symptoms of the patient on the other. This problem he simplified to a logical basis.
(2) *Correct interpretation of the phenomena produced by the experiments or provings was provided by close study of series of these experiments on groups of people. Thus the probability of error was reduced through the accumulation of more data, with increasing exact observation not only of results produced, but of possible interposing conditions which varied the results.
Hahnemann was soon convinced that (3) the *rational explanation of the phenomena was the thought, hinted at in the time of ancient Hindu sages, by Hippocrates, Paracelsus, Stahl and others throughout the course of medical history, that ” diseases are cured by medicines that have the power to excite a similar affection.”
While this thought had been applied occasionally, Hahnemann was the first to insist on the importance of this premise in every case where a true cure was achieved, as he was the first to test remedial substances and classify the results with this purpose in mind.
With (4) true *scientific construction he applied the principles evolved from his inductive reasoning and the correlating experiments he had conducted.
Briefly, then we find that these experiments had led Hahnemann to give a medicinal substances to healthy persons, to carefully record the effects-which were the production of symptoms of (artificial) disease-for the purpose of making these substances available for people suffering from like symptoms in(natural) disease syndromes. Thus developed his work in proving as we know
it.
This hypothesis, a process of inductive reasoning, proved to be a triumph through the discovery of scientific principles based on natural laws.
So, too, principles of inductive reasoning led Hahnemann, through his observation of the effects of remedies administered on the basis of symptom similarly, to the gradual decrease of the dose, because of the consequent drug effects (as differentiated from the remedial effects) of the substances administered. This decrease of the dose was developed according to a definitely scaled formula, and this in turn led to a principle of potentiation, or release of energy.
This discovery of the principle of potentization was Hahnemann’s greatest gift to science in general, and to medicine in particular. Had it not been for his powers of observation and his interpretation of these observations through rational explanation, and his action upon those observations, he would never achieved this eminence. When we consider the centuries of medical practice that preceded Hahnemann, and the years of medical practice and scientific research that have followed, and comprehend somewhat the significance of his discovery of powers released through minute division, we can but marvel at his keen logic and strive to follow his processes of reasoning.
Thus we readily see and appreciate the aptitude of Stuart Close’s description of homoeopathy, when he describes the foundations as “solid concrete, composed of the broken rock of hard facts, united by the cement of a great natural principle.. it is inseparable from the foundation.
This shows the relation of facts to the practice of homoeopathy, with an outline of the reasoning process by which homoeopathy was worked out and built up; and it is applicable in every concrete case which a homoeopathic physician may be called upon to treat. The principles involved are the same : the examination of the patient, or the record of the proving; the analysis and evaluation of the symptoms in each case; the selection of the remedy; all these are conducted under the rules and in an orderly method based upon inductive reasoning. Thus we determine what is characteristic in the patient and in the remedy; the characteristic symptoms are always the generals of the patient.
What is true of one symptom may often be true of the whole patient, as illustrated by the reaction to thermic changes of individual parts and symptoms, and may be true of the whole man; therefore, while we strive to form a picture of the totality of the symptoms we must instinctively evaluate, and find ourselves assembling symptoms as applying to the whole man or to his individual parts, as the case may be. As Close well puts it, in his *Genius of Homoeopathy :
Logic facilitates the comprehension of the related totality or picture of the symptoms of the case as a whole. From all the parts, logic constructs the whole. It reveals the case; in other words, by generalizing it assigns each detail to its proper place and gives concrete form to the case so that it may be grasped by the mind in its entirety.
The true “totality” is more than the mere numerical totality or whole number of the symptoms. It may even exclude some of the particular symptoms if they cannot, at the time, be logically related to the case. Such symptoms are called “accidental symptoms”, and are not allowed to influence the choice of the remedy. The “totality” is that concrete form which the symptoms take when they are logically related to each other and stand forth as an individuality, recognizable by anyone who is familiar with the symptomatic forms and lineaments of drugs and diseases.
The basis of the homoeopathic prescription is the totality of the symptoms of the patient, *as viewed and interpreted from the standpoint of the prescriber. A successful prescription cannot be made from the standpoint of the diagnostician, the surgeon nor the pathologist, as such, because of the differing interpretation and classification of symptoms. *A prescription can only be made upon those symptoms which have their counterpart or similar in the materia medica.
Individuality is inculcated always in the examination of a case. The three steps always followed in a carefully developed case consist in the examination of the patient, the examination of the symptom record of the patient, and the examination of the materia medica.
After these steps are logically taken and analysed they lead by the process of induction to the generals of the case, for the generals are the sum total of the particulars. The value of the generalization depends primarily upon the data from which it is drawn, for it is an axiom of philosophy that ” a general truth is but the aggregate of particular truths, a comprehensive expression by which an indefinite number of individual facts are affirmed or denied”.
It is not possible to form generals until we have considered special particular symptoms and analysed and assimilated them, in their relation to the whole. Minor particulars enter into major, and majors into one all-inclusive concept of the case. Such an all-inclusive major is *similia similibus curantur- the most complete and far-reaching generalization ever made from the deduction of individual facts.
The value of generalization depends in its essence upon the data from which it is drawn. The facts must be both accurate and complete.
Where we have many and clear mental symptoms they are always generals, for they represent the man in the most characteristic sense. Modalities again are always generals, for they are the natural modifiers of the case. “Where there are no generals,” says Kent,”we can expect no cures.”
The approach to the study of the case and the approach to the study of the materia medica are essentially the same- the materia medica is the *facsimile of the sickness.
